Maybe you are considering moving to a Linux distro like Ubuntu. Maybe you need to do a little bit of housekeeping on your web hosting server. Or maybe you are wondering how to open these strange compressed files you just downloaded with your new Mac. Whatever your reason may before wanting to know how to create and extract zip, tar, tar.gz, and tar.gz2 files, this Simplehelp tutorial should get you started.
.tar, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 are file extensions commonly found on files compressed with a Unix system. They are equivalent to the .zip files that are prevalent in the Windows PC world. The commands mentioned in this tutorial are all intended to be issued from a Unix command prompt. In Mac OS X, this is called the Terminal.
